Don't Even Go There—Travel Writing for the Rest of Us

Even if the world is your oyster, you can still chip a tooth on its shell. While travel magazines feature exotic locales of breathtaking beauty, we expose sites so depressing that no traveler this side of Edgar Allan Poe would venture there without a tub-load of tranquilizers. Take Las Vegas (please) and the $5.99 all-you-can-eat buffet line at Sam’s Town. That's the world we explore at Don’t Even Go There.

On this site, we tell of places we’ve visited but wish we hadn’t. We reveal vacation plans gone awry and relate horror stories from the road best abandoned. These true stories reflect where we’ve chosen to go. We only have ourselves to blame. We rarely needed to exaggerate—the truth really is stranger than a Dan Brown novel.

Don’t Even Go There: travel tips for those of us who aren’t escorted by security guards, pampered by wealthy benefactors, or provided a generous per diem. This blog is for seasoned travelers and armchair tourists who want the real world first-hand and head-on, with all its drama, horror, and humor. You’ll laugh at us, cry with us, and decide to stay home more often.

22 October 2010

We absolutely loathe corniness. We believe corny jokes should be punishable by death . . . or at least a rail right out of town. And don’t get us started on puns. That said, we do on occasion veer dangerously close to the line between pun and hate. Hey, you’re here, so you might as well read the following quote. You know you want to.

“We’ve done a lot of hitchhiking in our day. We’ve hitched for short distances and long, multi-day stretches. But we always arrived in one piece and with one line: ‘We just hitchhiked in from [wherever], and boy are our thumbs tired.’ ”

10 October 2010

This month, we introduce a new feature here at Don’t Even Go There. We’ve put this off as long as possible, but these stories keep piling up. Each trip we take contributes another sad story to the backlog. As always, we hope you learn from our mistakes. Maybe you’ll even laugh at our expense. Go ahead. We don’t care. We’re over it. We’ve moved on. Really, we’re . . . oh God. Did we really do that? —MB & JS
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Many years ago, during our college days, we had the opportunity to travel abroad. You can find some of these twisted tales here on our blog. What you won’t find is this particular story because we’ve never shared it before. We’ve never even told our best friends. It was categorized as “Need to Know,” and of course, no one ever needed to know what really happened.

In our defense, we were victims of a series of events that led, one after another, ultimately to our demise. Looking back on it, we could have prevented this mishap any number of ways. But we didn’t. We just went along with the flow.

The date was Thursday, 3 July 1980. The place was Munich, Germany. As Americans in a foreign land, the fourth of July was just another day. But, we decided, we had to celebrate somehow. We had secured tickets to see the legendary Frank Zappa in the Olympiapark that night. What could be better? Zappa was as American as apple pie and baseball.

That afternoon, however, we settled in to watch Wimbledon tennis on the telly with an Irish acquaintance. He brought with him a fifth of Johnny Walker Black. We proceeded to dip into it with gusto, three fingers at a time. We stayed longer than we should have, but somehow made it onto a bus headed for the Olympic Village on time for the show, with our tickets. That was the last good decision we made.

Memories are a little vague after reaching the concert site, but at some point during the festivities, Mark lost his wallet. That was bad enough, but it led to an embarrassing travel moment that still makes us cringe. After retracing our steps without luck, we must have looked like lovelorn saps because no fewer than three pretty German girls stopped to ask us why we had such long faces after such a great concert.

Our German language skills were fairly sharp at that point. We had conquered the tortured grammar. We were conversant. But we were also stupifyingly drunk. We wanted to say that we had lost a wallet. The German word for wallet is “Brieftasche.” That’s what we meant to say. Instead, we used the word “Taschentuch.” Taschentuch. For those you who haven’t studied German, it means handkerchief.

No wonder those girls abandoned us. We’d have done the same. So instead of spending a night of solace in the company of sweet, caring, nubile natives, we experienced a night of confusion, hurt, and yes, poverty. Ouch.

An Inside Look

How We Saw It: Our Rating System

We rate each place in ten categories for Don’t Even Go There. These ratings appear at the end of each sorry tale:

• Blight-Seeing—how decrepit a place it is—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means the place is so disgusting, you’ll almost wish you were in Detroit. Almost.

• Communication Breakdown—how difficult it is to communicate in English—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means speaking English could actually endanger your life.

• Customer Dis-service—how bad the service is—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 could indicate that you’ll have to carry your own bags, uphill, through a crowd of beggars who, if you’re lucky, will only give you a slight case of leprosy.

• Discomfort Level—how much you have to “rough it”—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means you better be in top physical shape just to survive the weekend.

• Grunge Factor—how dirty a place it is—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 indicates a need for anti-fungal cream, powerful bug spray, careful food choices, and boiling water before you drink it.

• Inactivity Guide—how many activities are available—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means a working TV set is an attractive entertainment option.

• Rent-Attainment—how difficult it is to get accommodations—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 indicates a big wad of cash won’t get you the time of day, never mind a mattress and box springs.

• Spontaneous Consumption—how the shopping compares to home—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means you’ll be tempted to buy stuff you’ll only regret later, especially when you pass through Customs on your way home.

• Fun Fraction—how much fun you can expect—rated 1/5 to 5/5, where a 5/5 can actually be fun, as long as you dress right and take the necessary precautions.

• Vibe-Rating—how the overall experience feels—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means that, believe it or not, we’d go there again. Don’t expect to see many of these.

An Inside Look

About Us

Mark is living a dream: writing to entertain and inform (luckily, he has a day job). His writing style has evolved from years of jotting down notes in the back of a pickup while hitchhiking. A recovering tech writer, he’s contributed to several published books and edits others for a living. He’s also writing a screenplay.

Jason took a more circuitous path to travel writing. First came the travel, then came the writing. He’s seen his share of places to avoid, up close and way too personal. After completing screenplays and television scripts, he became a filmmaker and video editor. He uses his acute eye to record detail Mark overlooked in his haste to get the hell out of there.

They have teamed up to create the Don’t Even Go There travel series. They hope it will turn conventional travel writing on its ear. They hope it will upset people. They hope it will lead its authors to a book deal, a movie idea, and maybe even a lawsuit.

Meanwhile, you get to experience a new bittersweet comedy vicariously, from the comfort of your computer chair, every week. Keep coming back, and leave a comment so we know you were here!

An Inside Look

Disclaimer

Most of the text and photos in this blog are copyright 2007-2017 by Mark Henry Bloom & Jason Scholder. All rights reserved. Contact us for reuse permission or to find out what we borrowed from another source. We would like to thank all our friends and relatives at this time who, knowingly or not, donated to our blog, some of whom we actually credit. With friends like these, who needs lawyers? Thank you.